May 29, 2010
David James Smith has just completed a week’s promotional tour of Young Mandela in South Africa.
Here is some of the coverage from Johannesburg and Cape Town:
Young Mandela – exclusive second extract in The Sunday Times
The first extract can be read here
May 24, 2010
Shaun describes the phone call that came on a Thursday in February, four months ago, as a moment he will never forget, and a moment he hopes never to repeat – even though, in a weird and not unconnected chain of events, it was a repeat of a moment from three years earlier.
read online at The Times website
Download article (pdf)
May 19, 2010
The pathologist was already working on the post-mortem. In life Christopher Jabelman had been an urbane, well-educated man who was drinking his way to oblivion. In death, the pathologist would report, he resembled somebody who had been hit full-on by a heavy lorry.
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May 15, 2010
Young MandelaNelson Mandela is the world’s greatest idol, universally recognised as a leader who symbolises moral authority. He has been mythologised as a flawless hero of the liberation struggle. But how exactly did his early personal and political life shape the triumphs to come?
May 15, 2010
One Morning In Sarajevo – 28 June 1914This is the true history of the young men who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and shaped the twentieth century. In an exciting new work of non-fiction that is every bit as thrilling as The Day Of The Jackal, David James Smith brilliantly re-investigates the plot that changed the world.
May 15, 2010
Supper With The CrippensDr Hawley Harvey Crippen lived with his wife, a music-hall variety performer called Belle Elmore, among the suburban villas of north London where he had set himself up in the fashionable business of homoeopathy.
May 15, 2010
All About Jill – The Life & Death of Jill DandoJill Dando was on the edge of happiness. The ‘golden girl’ of the BBC she was in love and about to be married, with the expectation of starting a family. Then came the morning of Monday 26 April 1999, when she met her killer on her own doorstep, a shocking tragedy in an ordinary London street.
May 15, 2010
The Sleep Of Reason – The James Bulger CaseFriday, February 12, 1993. They began the day playing truant and ended it running an errand for the local video shop. In between they abducted a two year old child and killed him on the railway line. Now the world has heard the identities of the two ten year olds who were convicted of murdering James Bulger. But, distorted and obscured by the frenzy of publicity that followed their trial, Jon Venables and Bobby Thompson remain an unknown presence at the heart of the case.
May 14, 2010
There is a place in my heart for the Old Bailey. One afternoon, 18 years ago, I went along to the Central Criminal Court and took a seat at random. I thought I was going to research a satirical drama about the judiciary, and I suppose I was hoping to hear a judge comment on the fragrance of a Tory wife or ask who the Beatles were. Instead, I found a well-off teenager in the dock alongside a wild, older Glaswegian. Together, as I discovered that afternoon, they had got drunk, taken drugs, tormented and finally killed a vulnerable local man in his own flat. The middle-class youngster described how he had pressed his palms against the wall for leverage as he had jumped up and down on his victim’s prostrate body. He recalled how he had listened to the sound of the ribs cracking…
read online at The Times website
download article (pdf)
May 14, 2010
The story you are about to read is a tragedy of French cinema, a meditation on life, death and amputation, the love and hate between a father and son, and a young man of Paris who lived hard and fast and all too briefly.
read online at The Times website
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May 14, 2010
They should have parted ways when the English lesson was over. Lindsay would have left the cafe alone and gone to work at the language school and got on with her life. She would have come home to England, eventually, returned to study, surely, become a GP, inevitably, as she had always intended, married Ryan maybe, had children, made grandparents of her parents, Bill and Julia, aunts of her sisters, Lisa and Louise, and made old bones herself.
read online at The Times website
download article (pdf)
May 14, 2010
Monday evening in September 2006, and two middle-aged men – neighbours, colleagues, friends – are having a pint at their local pub. They had walked down West Street to the Castle after a dinner to mark the start of the new term at the school where they worked. Both men were eminent in their profession, senior members of staff at one of the world’s most prestigious private schools, Harrow.
read online at The Times website
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May 14, 2010
Here nothing is ever quite what it seems to be. It should come as no surprise that the hand-carved solid oak entrance to the main building of Pinewood film studios is actually an extravagantly grand Elizabethan fireplace, imported seven decades ago from a stately home in Derbyshire. It was set up on plinths to make room for the doors beneath, which are from the RMS Mauretania, an ocean liner decommissioned in the 1930s. Pinewood bought the bulk of its fixtures and fittings at auction.
read online at The Times website
download article (pdf)
May 14, 2010
Kevin hid from the police the first time they came over to see him, in February. He was suffering from depression and decided he just couldn’t handle talking about it all. So, when the two officers flew in from Jersey and made their way to the hostel in Hackney where Kevin was staying, ready to take his statement, he had already left, and was hiding away at the home of a friend, waiting until the police had gone.
read online at The Times website
May 14, 2010
Tony Peterson was visiting his younger brother, Keith, in Boulder, Colorado, in the late 1990s. They were in a bookshop together when Keith plucked a paperback out of the remainder bin and said: “I’m buying this, do you want one?” Tony looked at the book, which was called Dreams from My Father. It meant nothing to him, but his brother said: “Well, look who wrote it.” The author’s name was Barack Obama. “That’s Barry!” said Keith.
read online at The Times website
May 14, 2010
No picture in a book or piece of film on TV can prepare you for the sheer power and fearsome enormity of a bull elephant up close. It certainly scared the hell out of our son that first morning in Zambia. From a distance, the bull and its mate and their baby had made a cute-looking nuclear family, traipsing across the plain towards some tasty foliage. As we drew alongside, the bull turned, reared its head and snorted.
read online at The Times website
May 10, 2010
On her own account, Jade Goody’s “la-la” was examined at the Princess Alexandra hospital in Harlow just before she went to India at the beginning of August last year. The hospital gave Goody the okay to travel to Mumbai, where she had been signed up to appear in the local version of the reality-television show Big Brother — known in India as Bigg Boss.
read online at The Times website
download article (pdf)
May 10, 2010
Later that day, after the soldiers’ parade had dispersed, Kier was walking across St George’s Square in his England shirt — “Eng-er-land! Eng-er-land! Eng-er-land!” the crowd had been chanting at the protesters. Kier was still feeling wound up by what he had just witnessed back by the Arndale. He had a cousin in the army, a family friend who had been killed in action. Bloody Muslim extremists, Kier was thinking to himself. How dare they!
read online at The Times website
May 10, 2010
They are a close and protective community, the old bunny girls from the Playboy Club in Park Lane. They post images of themselves as they once were — wire ears, pompom tails and all — on Playboy-staff reunion websites, using their old bunny names, reminding themselves of their lost world of glamour.
read online at The Times website
download article (pdf)
May 10, 2010
As one dissident Jersey politician who wished to remain nameless said to me when we huddled together one lunch time in a cramped St Helier cafe, you might have thought Jersey — its politicians and civil servants, its police force, its tourist industry — had something to celebrate when the police concluded that there had been no murders at Haut de la Garenne, the now-notorious children’s home.
read online at The Times website
download article (pdf)
May 10, 2010
Even now, 26 years later, Kelley can still remember how she looked, the night she met Gavin. Her hair was orange — a bleach gone wrong, it had got her suspended from school; she would later try to repair the error and send it cabbage-green instead — a black leather miniskirt, a pink-and-black leopardskin top. Kelley — pronounced as Keely — was 14, and her parents, her mum and stepdad, had specifically asked her to tone down her dress for the family party. It would be a boring party full of very ordinary-looking people, she knew. Just the thought of it was hell on earth to her.
read online at The Times website
download article (pdf)
On the cover of The Sunday Times Magazine…
The Sleep Of Reason – The James Bulger Case by David James Smith:
Faber Finds edition with new preface, available September 15th, 2011.
Young Mandela the movie – in development.
From The Guardian
Read the article
In the Diary column of The Independent, April 13th, 2011
More on my previously unsubstantiated claim that the writer-director Peter Kosminsky, creator of The Promise, is working on a drama about Nelson Mandela. I’ve now learnt that the project is a feature film, in development with Film 4, about the young Mandela. Kosminsky is currently at work on the script and, given the complaints about the anti-Jewish bias of The Promise, it is unlikely to be a standard bland portrait of the former South African president.
Nelson Mandela was circumcised as a 16-year-old boy alongside a flowing river in the Eastern Cape. The ceremony was similar to those of other Bantu peoples. An elder moved through the line making ring-like cuts, and foreskins fell away. The boys could not so much as blink; it was a rite of passage that took you beyond pain. read full review
Jon Venables: What Went Wrong
BBC 1, 10.35
Thursday, April 21st, 2011
